Reflective Writing Project Text

While I was writing my project text I encountered many difficulties, one of my difficulties was how I start my essay. I learned when I was working on my writing process that using is outline seemed to work for me. I wrote an outline of three main points I wanted to discuss during my essay and how they connected to one another.

Brainstorm for Project Text Essay:

        I.             Normal Vs. Abnormal

·         What society considered normal people and abnormal people

·         How they separated the two “types” of human beings

      II.            Learning from the mentally ill?

·         The doctor took the elephant man in with him and studied him to try to find a way to “cure” him

·         “The great Confinement” talks about how “hospitals

    III.            Abnormal people were put on a “show” and were made fun of

·    While I was writing my essay I was finally able to realize what rhetoric is. I never was able to fully understand what rhetoric was but now I understand it better. Knowing what rhetoric is helped me understand better what it is that I was going to be writing.

Project Text

Leslie Moreno                                                                                                                  Moreno 1

English 114 B

Professor Macklin

22, February 2012

What is Abnormal?

How does one define deformed? There are many different definitions for the word deformed, such as disfigured, misshapen, morally perverted, and even so badly formed or out of shape as to be ugly. These definitions are the worst thing to ever call another human being. The world that we live in now is driven by the outward appearance of another human being. People are split into two categories: normal and abnormal. What I did not understand about this categorization of people was how they define a person as normal? Was a person normal if they had blond hair? Were they abnormal if they had black hair? Was an abnormal person someone with a big head? Someone who had a mental illness? Some people who are considered abnormal were put on display at shows where they are made fun of and tortured. In Bernard Pomerance’s play called The Elephant Man he writes about a, man who is abnormal and how a doctor tries to help him become normal. I hear the phrase, “All men were created equal,” so why did the people not understand that and treat abnormal people as unequal. The categorization of people into normal and abnormal is unjust, because all humans are suppose to have been born the same, with a beating heart. It is unjust because not only do we not

                                                                                                                                                  

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recognize them as one of us but it makes these “abnormal” people feel they don’t belong, and that there is no place for them in society. Society is built upon the principle that “all men are created equal,” it is the law of the land so why don’t we obey the law and consider each other equal.

If I were to ask a person what they think is a normal person, most people would find it difficult to answer because they themselves don’t fully now either. Yet, if I were to ask who they consider as abnormal people they would say people who are deformed. The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance is a play about a man named John Merrick who is publicly humiliated because of the deformation of his head.  He is called the elephant man because when his mother was pregnant she was hurt by an elephant and so he was born deformed. In The Elephant Man Ross the manager of Merrick says, “Tuppence only, step in and see! For in order to survive, Merrick forces himself to suffer these humiliations.”(The Elephant Man 3) What Ross said was unfortunately true because Merrick is not treated like a normal person he can’t work like everyone else can. “Normal” people can work and walk on the street like nothing, they can do whatever they want because they are normal.  People even used to try to completely separate normal from abnormal people by putting them into “hospitals.”

Michel Foucault wrote in his book Madness and Civilization about the insanity during the Age of reason. The second chapter of his book is called The Great Confinement, and he writes about how hospitals were “assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane.” (Foucault 39)All of these people were put to live under the

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same roof, and those who could work were put to work inside the hospital. “In its functioning, or in its purpose, the Hospital General had nothing to do with any medical concept. It was an instance order, of the monarchical and bourgeois order being organized in France during this period.” (Foucault 40) He believed that hospitals were supposed to be a place for medical needs not to house prisoners and insane people together. Although these hospitals did help in some ways, for example they provided work for people who were poor and had no job. These hospitals also put a roof over the heads of poor people who had nowhere to live. As for the insane people, since they could not work what they did with them is that they studied their mental illness to try to understand it more. The doctors studied what kind of illness it was, what it did to the person and what could they do to make it better or prevent it. Even though it seems like these hospitals seemed to do good Foucault disagreed for the main reason that in these hospitals they were trying to change the people to be just like everyone else.

The purpose of these hospitals were to separate the normal people from the abnormal. Society did not want the normal humans to be interacting with the abnormal humans so they separated them. While doing so they had the people inside work to keep the hospitals going, even though it did not last. They were just way too complicated places to keep so many different people, with different needs, living together. They had to keep the prisoners in check and take care of the mentally ill plus make sure the poor people were doing their jobs. In The Elephant man, Treves also took Merrick in to try to study Merrick’s condition and help him with his illness.

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Treves is the doctor in The Elephant Man, who takes Merrick in so that he could help him. Treves studies Merrick to see what it is that Merrick has and how he can fix it. While he studies Merrick he also teaches him how to be normal, he teaches him what it is to be a normal person. Treves start discovering that Merrick is normal, he is intelligent event thought he has a disease. Merrick said, “But sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams,” and I believe him. I believe that he was a normal person because he was just like every human on this planet, he had a heart and he dreamed.  Personally I think that a normal human is one who has a heart and who dreams, and the good thing about that is that every single human is born with both.

There is one small difference between the world today and the world before, that it is filled with people who are friendlier to “deformed” humans than in older times. In older times “deformed” humans were treated horribly and worst than they are treated today, they were displayed as “objects” to be made fun of by people who paid to see them. Personally I am against the discrimination of “deformed” humans and I never like the thought that they were once put on display to be made fun of; the world is a cruel place. Yet in this cruel world I believe that people are not bad and that they don’t mean to judge they were just raised in a society where it is normal to judge. Deep down I think that everyone feels guilty about it and sometimes even do something to change it. Now a day I see people standing up for “abnormal” people, I even see them hanging out and laughing together. People have changed and have begun to realize that no matter what we are all humans born into the same cruel world.

                       

Freewrite #2

What is a rhetorical situation?
A rhetorical situation is when something happenes that you dont expect to happend. I have no idea :(

Freewrite #1

One weakness that i would like to work on is  my weakness of understanding what happenes in the class half of the time. i never seem to fully undertstand what im writing about, or what the class is discussing. My stronger point would be that no matter what i always seem to do my work even if i dont fully understand. i am hoping i acctually understand more so i could write a better essay.

Essay 3: Literacy Narrative

Leslie Moreno                                                                                                                                 Moreno 1

Professor Macklin

English 114 A

21, November 2011

Literacy Narrative

            Children start attending school around four years old, and as they grow they start to develop two very important factors in their lives, reading and writing. Kids are told that they must remain in school in order to become someone in this world we live in. Besides graduating with a diploma from at least high school, a person should be able to read and write proper English. I believe that a person does need to know how to read and write in English because it’s the most known language in the U.S.A; person cannot work at a department store only knowing Chinese or Spanish, most people would not understand them. English is not a question of whether you want to learn it or not, it’s a matter of you have to learn it in order to survive. Even for college students, they did not make it to college not knowing English; they needed to develop their English skills in order to make it as far as college. C.S.Lewis wrote, “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

            When I was four and I started school, I was scared to attend I didn’t know what to expect. After a while I began to love school because all I really did was play with my friends. As I

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grew older I started to learn more and more English without even knowing it. We would learn it through songs we would sing and games we would play. After years of going to school I started to hate going to school because as the years past I got to play less and less until it got to the point where I didn’t get to play in class. I couldn’t play inside and I could only play for twenty minutes outside, it eventually got to the point where I sat in a desk for most of the day reading different books. I never thought about how I was having the privilege of learning English and other subjects for free. Children from other parts of the world can’t even go to school. Fredrick Douglas once wrote, “During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these I learned mainly how to write.” Fredrick Douglas had to use other objects in order to learn how to read and write English.

Many kids don’t seem to fully understand how important it is to learn English and to take advantage of the free schooling provided.  Even for those kids who graduate from high school, they don’t want to continue their studies and are okay with any job.  The point for us as students is to be able to go further than our parents did to be able to achieve that feeling in life that we accomplished something. It is not an easy road but it is not an impossible one either, for some reason most kids now think it is too hard and so they will not go forth in education. We ourselves make it impossible for being lazy and not wanting to reach a little bit further. They probably believe since they know English they can work something out, and why stop there if you can make life just a bit easier by studying a little bit more. They can have the work they always wanted to work, they can work on something that they truly love to do.

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I believe English is a vital element for any person living in the US, without it people could not survive. When I go to the store they have people speaking English and another language, but their main language is English. A person cannot work at a department store and only speak another language that is not English. In this country we live in, the majority of people speak English; if a costumer were to ask for help and the employee only knew Chinese or Spanish then how would the costumer get what she needs? If the cashier at the cash register only understood Spanish then how would the customers’ pay for their things? Every single job has an English speaking role; the employees must know English to communicate with customers, other employees, and their bosses.  During the Christmas season, such as Black Friday, if a customer has a heart attack or an accident happened where a customer is dying and the ambulance come and ask the employee what happened and the employee only knows Spanish what happens? There might be witnesses but you as an employee is responsible to get every detail of what happened what will you do? It is a very tough world out there and sometimes people don’t get what they want, not because they don’t want it but because they don’t try hard to get it.

            I feel that we as humans have to try to surpass our own abilities and try to surpass our own learning abilities. Humans are known as unique creatures because we have the ability to do things other animals can’t, yet other animals aren’t as dumb as human beings. Animals are known to be at the bottom of the food chain and humans right on top, they are known to have more intelligence than us and I agree. When an animal feels danger it runs the opposite way, yet when a human feels danger it somehow goes towards it, how does that make sense? When the climate changes or the weather becomes really bad animals adapt to their environment in order to survive, we just put on some blankets and a heater and all we are doing is wasting electricity. Then again they don’t have to go to school or learn English and how to write, but I feel it’s the same situation as animals learning how to survive and humans learning to survive. Animals need to learn to adapt to their environment and they need to learn how to survive through different obstacles. I believe humans have to also; we have to learn how to survive on our own, if it means we learn English and be able to write it then so be it. Our brains and bodies are built to learn and grow, why not take advantage of what we have? Most of us might not be rich, we may be poor but we can become rich, we can become someone in life. My parents are poor, they don’t have brand new cars or expensive clothes but they did everything they could so that my sisters and I would live the life we live. I am attending California State University Northridge, I made it to a place no one believed I would make it to and yet here I am, writing an essay on English. English was a stepping stone to my now present day and it will continue to be throughout my future. I thank the people that taught me English, my teachers that helped me have the opportunity to be where I am. Thank you, English.

Excersise 3.3 Argumentive Proposal

Leslie Moreno                                                                                                                        Moreno 1

Professor Macklin

English 114A

15, November 2011

Argumentative Proposal

            English is known as the most known language in the United States. It’s said that to live in this country you must be able to write and read in English. In any job someone applies for they have to know how to speak and write English. It is said that in order to move to a higher living people have to know English. In order for someone to achieve greatness, achieve the “American Dream” they must know English. I agree that in order to survive in this country you need to know English, but I disagree that just by knowing English itself that you will achieve your lifelong goal. People are lazy and they think that just an average job is okay and just by knowing the English language everything is alright, when in fact it is not. Literature is a “steppingstone” for those who want to achieve greatness.

            I read an essay from Greg Lewis called “An open letter to Diversity’s Victims” and as I was reading it I thought I disagreed with him. He wrote about how in the old days in schools they would separate the kids into classes by the language they spoke. If you spoke Spanish you were put in classes where the language they talked in was Spanish. He thought it was unfair that different diversities couldn’t learn to speak English. I agree with him only to that point because afterwards he starts talking about how without English they cannot get a higher job position. I believe the problem is people not knowing English but it’s the people themselves who are the problem.  Many children are raised here and go to school, but it is their problem if they don’t want to continue in their education. In 2011 there were less kids attending college than before, it wasn’t because of money, it was because they were lazy to go any further. Children have to learn that in order to be better in this world they have to work hard and most kids don’t like the “work hard” part. He wrote “Don’t let diversity destroy your soul and rob you of the chance to be who you truly are.” He is right, no one should not reach for success just because of their diversity, and everyone is born into this world with a chance, whether they take it or not it is up to them.

            Julia alvarez wrote Dona Aida, With your Permission, and she may have not had problems with English but what she did is a good example of what I mean. She is an American-Dominican writer and she was a keynote speaker at an annual meeting along with another woman named Aida. Aida spoke in Spanish and she spoke in English. When they were done Aida told her, “It doesn’t seem possible that a Dominican should write in English. Come back to your country, to your language. You are a Dominican.” She replied by telling her that she cannot be a Dominican writer because she was not born there, she is not a true Dominican. I feel that she should have been proud that she is successful and she used her studies to her advantage but I don’t think she should have responded that way. She should have said how proud she was to be a successful English writer proving a Dominican can be successful in English, and that she would be willing to learn more about Dominican so she can be better than how she is. I admire her for her hard work but I wish she could have reached a little further to become greater than she already is.

            Literacy is a big part of the United States and I feel sad many kids do not take the opportunity to continue and become the best that they can be. I hate seeing people on the street and it’s hard to have a good life, but no one said that life was easy. People say this line all the time but what they do not know is that if you try hard life will become easier, maybe not all the time but at least you will not suffer as other people do. Life is tiny seed that with time and good care it will grow to become a beautiful and strong tree. It is hard and a lot of kids don’t like school, I’m not a big fan either but I will push myself to become the best I can be. Life is a huge ocean and in order to cross it to my dream I begin with stepping stones, and one of the first stepping stones are English itself.